Generating Civic Capital: FCC’s Open Developer Day

The National Broadband Plan called on government to “leverage broadband to experiment with new ideas and technologies to extend opportunities for engagement.” In that spirit, we’re excited to highlight the FCC’s Open Developer Day, coming up this Monday, November 8.

All of us at the FCC, and especially our Chief Data Officer, Greg Elin, have been focused on the power and possibilities of making more data available to citizens, tinkerers and developers; Open Developer Day will be yet another demonstration of that focus. As Greg highlighted in a blog post last week, the event will bring together citizen developers and engineers from Yahoo! to develop a clearinghouse Web application intended to make it as easy as possible for people with disabilities, families, and support professionals to find information about accessible technologies. It will also support the Plan’s recommendation that the FCC “create an ongoing web presence to allow participants to share information about public and private accessibility efforts and discuss accessibility barriers and inaccessible products.”

We hope that Open Developer Day will inspire other federal agencies to hold their own Open Developer Days and apply similarly innovative approaches to tackling public challenges. Joshua Tauberer, who founded the congressional transparency website Govtrack.us in his spare time (!), has said that “open data is civic capital.” Platforms for effectively using open data are civic capital too, and we look forward to seeing what our participants on Monday generate.

Capture The Phone Numbers Using Your Camera Phone

If you have a camera and a 2D matrix code reader on your mobile phone, you can capture the FCC Phone numbers right to your phone by following these three easy steps:
Step 1: Take a photograph of one of the codes below using the camera on your mobile phone.
Step 2: Use your phone's Datamatrix or QR Code reader to decode the information on the photograph. Please note, these code readers are device specific and are available to download on the internet.
Step 3: Store the decoded address information to your phone's address book and use it with your Maps or GPS application.